Partly due to an inherited difference in the way alcohol is metabolized.

Partly due to growing up in a household, where you get less attention.

Partly due to just picking up your parents bad habits.

This was elegantly demonstrated by a Pennsylvania farther recently - when he went to pick up his son who was charged with drunk driving. And the police realized the farther was shit-canned as well, and busted him for DUI.

Everything is growing like mad all over the 30 acres of jungle that Mrs. Gagg and I have to try keep under control.

Life is a purgatory of mulching, weeding, mowing, pruning, digging, fertilizing, composting, fixing fences - in addition to an unrealistic number of not just maintenance projects we have going.

And it all centers right about L5/S1.

That is, it gets you in your lumbar spine - and one of my facet joints in particular (where the lower part of one vertebra articulates with the one below) which is presumably wearing out and probably fossilizing.

And it makes you grimace and groan as you struggle to stand up from weeding or when you roll out of bed in the mornings, like some nonagenarian crone.

I went to Dr K., the orthopedist. He tentatively brought up Physical Therapy - but I told him “get real.” There’s no chance of my having the discipline to be compliant with that - so he sends me to my interventional radiologist buddy J. McL - for a cortisone shot.

An interventional radiologist, as the name suggests, intervenes - with needles, tubes, catheters and any other implement of torture they can think of. All under X-ray guidance - so they supposedly know which organ or part of the body the offending implement is in - which is why it is a radiologist doing it and not just a communal-garden sadist.

As an aside, the pay structure in medicine is insane. You get paid up the wazoo for any kind of procedure, and nothing for “cognitive skills” - i.e. your intellect, knowledge, diagnostic abilities - all that grueling brain work that is required to manage those little old ladies with ten diseases on twenty medicines.

Interventional radiologists are proceduring all day long, thus are fabulously rich - and nowadays every medical students wants to be one (instead of those super versatile, much needed grunts of the medical profession, Family Physicians).

But I have always pulled J.McL’s leg about how he tortures people all day, and how I’m sure he did his Internship at the Tower of London.

So when I text him and tell him “Dr K. wants you to give me a facet block” he responds immediately, and I can sense the alacrity with which he tells me he will be “extremely happy” to do so.

Well I go to see him in the office he’s just moved in to - which just happens to be across the road from the local Hooters, which, I tell him, “I presume was why you picked this location?”

Do they have special S&M Hooters?

So, he gives me a shot, and it’s really not too bad, and I even get a slight improvement after a couple of days, but then we relapse, and basically it really hasn’t done a whole lot. I told him, “next time use the real thing, not the placebo” when he suggests a re-do.

But in the mean time, I have discovered ibuprofen. The occasional one at night, when you remember, doesn’t do a whole lot. But taking two (400 mg) twice a day regular as clockwork is fairly good - though I’m still pretty seized up after we had to cut down a large tree and take down a fence to build a deck by the pool.

But then the dog gets sick. First of all, won’t put weight on his left front leg, and is just lying around unwilling to even go from one room to the next. Won’t eat. Just miserable - this is this half Great Dane, half Lab’, daft as a brush, partly due to a terrible mishap when he was six months old and (somehow) got trapped under the house with his left rear leg hooked over a pipe. No one knew he was there, and he was without food or water for ten days, until the smell from his now gangrenous back leg alerted us (that and the sudden new groaning noise from the crawl space under the bedroom when my daughter was getting ready to go to school one morning).

The gangrenous leg removed by the local vet and never looked back - so it appeared. But having just one back leg has caused the hip joint of the remaining leg to wear out and become extremely arthritic - shown on an x-ray the vet took when we took him in to see why he was suddenly so under the weather.

The pain from this is what was making him so miserable and inactive, was the vet’s diagnosis. So she prescribed him some Rimadyl - a Pfizer product that contains carprofen, and is “the #1 prescribed canine NSAID* in the world,”and “the #1 reason” for your dog to wag his tail, that will make him “adventurous, frisky, playful, energetic, healthy, lively, bouncy, curious, colorful, active, spunky”… and “a true RimaDog!” according to the website - they must have some really highly paid copy writers at Pfizer.

So the dog is on pretty much the same medicine as I have been treating myself with, or prescribing for my patients for years (It always amazes me how it seems you can get any kind of treatments for animals that is available for humans -  the vet offered us a doggy total hip replacement as well).

Not that I was seriously considering it, and didn’t even dare ask the price. But within a day, all thoughts of the dog needing surgery were banished - by the fact that he was tearing around just like his old self, or better.

So that got me thinking. Maybe I could be adventurous, frisky, playful, energetic, healthy, lively, bouncy, curious, colorful, active and spunky?

Which brings me to Kristen Johnston, who is battling addiction according to a piece in the London Daily Mail.

She was stealing Vicodin from her mother, who had just had knee surgery - which is pretty low dog (if you’ll pardon the canine pun). But then she stooped to the ultimate low.

She was “taking pain killers prescribed to my own sweet dog.” 

Who Should Get the Medicine?

*NSAID stands for non-steroidal anti inflammatory medicine, like ibuprofen (in Advil and Motrin), naproxen (in Aleve), aspirin, or one of numerous of prescription arthritis medicines.

First, Claire Simmons, a 33 year old from Notting Hill in London has eaten nothing but pizza for the last 31 years (can you imagine anyone who would let their kid eat exclusively pizza from age 2?). But she shakes when presented with other foods apparently.

Then Stacey Irvine from Birmingham, who is 17, has eaten only chicken nuggets for the last 15 years (two must be a vulnerable age). She has anemia breathing problems and was recently rushed to hospital with swollen veins in her tongue (some new “nugget disease”? Maybe there’s Nobel Prize in the offing?)

The only meat that 44 year old Jonathan McGowan, from  Bournemouth, in southern England, has eaten for the last 30 years has been road kill - fox has a lovely texture and no fat;  frogs and rats are good in stir fries;  owl makes a good curry (who’d have guessed) but badger’s not nice, and hedgehog is “hideous.”

These seem to be victims of  “Selective Eating Disorder” which is a continuation or exaggeration of being a faddy eater and unwilling to try new foods according toe the University College London Institute of Child Health.

OK, SED is a little quirky and eating exclusively pizza or chicken nuggets is liable to lead to health problems from too little of some foods (vitamins, minerals, fiber etc) and too much of others (fat, cholesterol, food additives). But you could be even more screwy and have “objectum sexuality” like 27 year old Amanda Whittaker - which affects other appetites.

This is a condition where you fall in love with inanimate objects. She was in love with a drum kit (and used to take one of her drums to bed), but now she’s in love with the Statue of Liberty - who just “barged in” apparently.

She has pictures and statuettes in her house and visits as often as possible and says she is “blown away by how stunning she is.”

Actually it’s not fare to blame the Brit’s for being the only crazy ones to present these Monty Python-esq type conditions - there’s a Swedish woman in love with a red fence who is married to the Berlin wall. And a woman in Pennsylvania who is in love with an amusement ride and sleeps with a picture of it.

British media psychologist Dr Funke Baffour says objectum sexuality is a form of Asperger’s Syndrome - in this case in women, not men as in the post on Asperger’s about how all women think their husbands have it. 

Whittaker and her love

But I think the bottom line is there are some pretty damn crazy people out there.

I’m not sure that I am entirely wrong; that it is because American orthodontists have such an effective and avaricious marketing machine.

But a researcher at the University of Kent in the UK examined the skulls of 11 different cultures around the world and noted the lower jaws (mandibles) of farm fed people were shorter and the teeth more crowded as opposed to hunter gatherers who had longer roomier mandibles.

The conclusion is it’s all to do with how much you chew. The food you get from the farm is all soft and mushy and doesn’t need so much chewing as big chinks of meat, roots and leaves.

So raw steak and cracking walnuts with your teeth and we could put the orthodontists out of business.

The One That Got Away

And these same guys get obsessed with numbers.

David Finch (whose wife Kristen put him through a home questionnaire assessment and diagnosed him) just wrote a book The Journal of Best Practices, about what not to do (like “Don’t change the radio station when Kristen’s singing along”). He says he remembers the date his niece was born “because she was born on March 14, 2008, which is well-known among my fellow nerds in the math and science communities as “Pi Day” because pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, is equal to 3.14. Also 3 + 14 + 2 + 0 + 8 totals 27, which is divisible by 3, and I love numbers that are divisible by 3, particularly numbers whose digits sum to 27, of which 3 is the cube root.”

That’s how their brain works.

They tend to have rituals and be over sensitive to sensations, feel tortured by clothes tags, clothes that are too tight or made in the ‘wrong material’.

Or David Finch wore swimming goggles when bathing the kids because he couldn’t stand it if water got in his eyes. The kids thought it was quirky and cool.

When getting his daughter to help him with breakfast he asked if she knew what to do - so she showed him. She lined the egg carton exactly on the counter, filled the pot and “she closed the faucet, opened it, closed it, opened it, closed it, tapped her forehead, opened it and closed it the same way that I do.”

Einsteine, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Keanu Reeves, Al Gore, and Garrison Keillor are some of the many notable public figures that experts believe show symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome

But the claim is, all women who hear about the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome for the first time. Hear about he difficulty in social interactions, missing of social cues, egotism, blunt speech, a need for ’space’ fear of confrontation and obsession with subjects like sports scores. They are all are convinced their husbands have it.

 
It makes you do wierd shit

It’s the step after you get fed up with using it as a clothes rack.

But can you caste off the guilt of the failed resolution to exercise, as easily as you can caste off the machine?

He sold his exercise machine

Science shows it competes with Adenosine for receptor sites where it stimulates rather than depresses. And this makes the pituitary gland tell the adrenals to release adrenalin.

So we’re ready for “flight or fight” - but instead Ken gets wacky.

He is an erudite and educated fellow. He is teaching me the American language.

A naïve foreigner would not fathom VPL as visible panty line - which I gather the thong and the “teddy” have done much to amend.

BCG I would take to mean the TB preventing vaccine,  “Bacillus Calmette-Guerin,” as we learned in medical school. But Ken is sharing the jargon of the optician he once was, where they talked about a product so inelegant that it was “birth control glasses”.

 And I was impressed with the breadth of his knowledge of animal anatomy when he started describing the appearance of “cameltoe” - until he explained this was a feature of women in particularly tight pants - which Wikipedia succinctly explains is where “the pudendal cleft may take on the look of the forefoot of a camel”

      Can you tell which is the real camel?                                         

Come join us at Blackstone’s some morning for a 20-ounce Dark Roast, some conversation and education.

Well in Italy it has just really happened - to the tune of $15 million.

Maria Assunta died at age 94 with no heirs and left her entire fortune to Tomassino, a stray cat she had adopted.

It sounds like the Italian economy needs the money more than the damn cat.

Writing about the farce of congress calling French fries and tomato sauce on frozen pizza “a vegetable” in school meals, Krisitin Wartman notes large food companies such as conAgra and Schwan spent $5.6m lobbying. And, lo and behold, congress killed the proposed Department of Agriculture guidelines to increase the amount of (badly needed) fruit and vegetables in school lunches.

congressional vegetables

As usual, congress didn’t have the balls to do the right thing (is there anyone in either house who will do the right thing, not jus what ever will bring them the most money/best chance or re-election/power?)

The argument, conservatives are reported as making, is that it is not the job of the “Nanny State” to tell people what to eat.

There are so many flaws to this argument - in that we legislate what’s good for people in so many other places.

But the point Wartman makes is it’s not the government that controls our kid’s desire to eat the “sugary, salty and fatty products” that are causing them to become fat, diabetic, hypertensive and atherosclerotic.

“Corporations do” she says, through relentless advertising and their monopoly on schools cafeterias.

Divine

Any way, lo and behold, she has a famous pair of knockers now.